How I found Cardenio, Shakespeare's lost play

As a Renaissance scholar, I've been piecing together fragments of a play believed to be part-written by Shakespeare. Now the results are about to go on show

Putting one and one together ... Pippa Nixon and Alex Hassell in the RSC's Cardenio – a different reconstruction – earlier this year. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
Tristram Kenton/Guardian

In the spring of 1613, the office of the Treasurer of the King's Chamber recorded two separate payments to the King's Men – William Shakespeare's company – for performances of a play called Cardenna or Cardenno. The two records presumably refer to the same play, since it is unlikely that the King's Men had two different plays whose titles differed by only a single letter. Court records almost always abbreviated play titles, and the clerks who wrote these draft accounts were primarily concerned with exactly how much money was paid to whom. Almost all scholars agree that both payments refer to Cardenio.

Cardenio's story, based on a section from Cervantes's masterpiece Don Quixote, is a tragicomedy set in the Spanish mountains, populated by goatherds and shepherds, lovers, madmen and nunneries. Of playwrights known to have been writing for the King's Men in the years 1611–14, only three wrote pastoral tragicomedies: Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher and William Shakespeare.

In 1653 the leading English publisher of plays and poetry, Humphrey Moseley, registered his copyright in a list of 42 plays. Somewhere mid-list is "The History of Cardenio, by Mr Fletcher & Shakespeare". Shakespeare had yet to become English literature's biggest cash cow, and Moseley never published that play (or many others that he registered). Moseley's title-phrase, The History of Cardenio, appears verbatim in the first English translation of Part One of Don Quixote, published in 1612. Since the phrase appears nowhere else in English, the play that Moseley registered must, logically speaking, have dramatised the Cardenio episodes from Cervantes's novel. It's a plausible attribution to Fletcher and Shakespeare.

In December 1727 the Drury Lane theatre performed a play based on the Cardenio episodes in Don Quixote, and based in particular on the 1612 translation. It was called Double Falshood, or The Distrest Lovers, and the edition printed that month declared it was "written originally by W Shakespeare; and now revised and adapted to the stage by Mr Theobald". Lewis Theobald was a minor playwright, minor poet and the world's first Shakespeare scholar.

Did Theobald possess a manuscript of The History of Cardenio? For the past 100 years, respected attribution specialists have concluded that he did, and that Double Falsehood includes passages clearly written by Fletcher and others probably written by Shakespeare. Next year, which will be the quatercentenary of the publication of Thomas Shelton's 1612 translation of Don Quixote, Oxford University Press will publish The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes and the Lost Play, which includes new empirical evidence based on modern databases. Double Falsehood contains writing by Fletcher and Shakespeare – and Theobald. So what we have is parts of a play, written by two great playwrights, rearranged and overlaid and mixed with material written by a not-so-great playwright more than a century later.

But what's left after we get rid of Theobald? Fragments. And a lot of questions. Why did Theobald add a speech here? Why did he change a name there? Why does one 18th-century phrase appear in the middle of a Jacobean sentence? Why did Theobald leave out material that was in the novel? Because Shakespeare and Fletcher left it out or because he (or Drury Lane) didn't like it?

As a scholar I have been talking about Renaissance drama for 35 years. But since 1992 I've been doing more than talk: I've been working with a series of companies (seven different directors, nine groups of actors), trying to figure out how to put the pieces of Fletcher and Shakespeare's Humpty Dumpty back together again. This Sunday at Shakespeare's Globe in London, 16 actors directed by Wilson Milam will read the latest version of this experiment. Is it as good as your favourite Shakespeare play? Of course not. Is it better than Theobald? You tell me.